Today's internet users are likely to publish content on numerous websites. For example, a content producing internet user is likely to have photographs published on Flickr, MySpace and Facebook and video on YouTube, Google Video, College Humor and similar sites. Most users keep copies of this type of published content on their local computers.
The same internet users are likely to backup their local computers to an online backup site. When a user publishes content online and backs-up the same content to an online site, the user uploads the same media and document files twice, once to an online content sharing site (e.g., Flickr, MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, etc.) and once to the backup site. As media files can be very large, this duplicated uploading consumes a great deal of time and limited user bandwidth. The same problem occurs when users upload files to other types of online sites (e.g., ftp sites or mail servers) and separately backup the same files to an online backup site.
It would be desirable for users to be able to leverage online storage to avoid having to upload the same files to external sites more than once.